Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76329 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 356 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Years ago, Adam Hochschild came across a reference to the "five to eight million lives" destroyed in the colonial exploitation of the Congo. Startled, he realised that this had been "one of the major killing grounds of modern times. Why were these deaths not mentioned in the standard litany of our century's horrors?" His corrective history makes sobering and gripping reading. In King Leopold of Belgium, who decided to buy himself an empire to compensate for his country's smallness, he portrays a villain of Shakespearian dimensions. Aided by Stanley (of "Mr Livingstone I Presume" fame) the king appropriated a section of central Africa the size of Western Europe as his personal territory. The appalling brutality that ensued, as Europeans plundered the country for rubber and ivory, is vividly captured by Hochschild. He manages to leaven the horror with touches of grotesque humour--for instance, when tricking tribal chiefs into signing away their land for bales of cloth, Stanley would, to impress his dupes, secrete a battery in his pocket with the wires in his palm, so that on shaking hands the chief "was greatly surprised to find his white brother so strong that he nearly knocked him off his feet". Hochschild has something of Simon Schama's gift for populist history; and among other things he provides astonishing background to Joseph Conrad's Congo-set masterpiece, Heart of Darkness. --Adam Roberts

Giles Foden, The Guardian, 24 April 1999
"As Adam Hochschild tells in his fascinating book about the Congo's terrible encounter with Europe. . . . the creation of Zaire under the dictator Mobutu, the break-up of that country and its renaming Congo, and the civil war that rages there now--all of these can be traced back to Leopold's bloody enterprise."

Robert Harms, Times Literary Supplement, August 27, 1999
"Hochschild, in his thoroughly researched and engagingly written book, tells the story of one of the greatest human rights crimes in the past hundred years. . . . King Leopold's Ghost has all the tension and drama that one would expect in a good novel. At the same time it is . . . carefully researched and historically accurate."

Customer Reviews

An epic theme that deserves a better treatment
The process by which the Congo was opened and colonised was unique in African history. This book details Leopold II of Belgium's acquisition and ruthless exploitation of the region as a personal fief, an undertaking that was simultaneously epic and squalid. Untold hundreds of thousands of Africans - perhaps even millions, the statistics are uncertain - died under conditions of the most appalling suffering to satisfy this mean-spirited egomaniac's greed. Worse still, the whole callous process, which descended at times into orgiastic sadism, was aided and abetted by a range of administrators, business interests and even missionaries. Leopold dominates the narrative, a malign, hypocritical and wealth-obsessed spider at the centre of a vast business web, busy until his deathbed in creating schemes of breath-taking ambition and of true, unadulterated evil, never visiting the lands he made a hell, never glimpsing the wretches whose lives he ruined. Almost as an aside he also very competently cheated his own Belgian subjects as part of his profit-maximisation and, when international pressure finally made continued running of the Congo as a private estate impossible, dumped it upon them, so creating the seeds of another tragedy from the 1960's onwards. Villains outnumber the heroes in the story by a substantial margin, and the efforts of the magnificent trio of E.D. Morel, Roger Casement and the Liverpool shipping magnate John Holt to expose the scandal and end the abuses were rewarded with only qualified success. This book is readable, and covers the basic facts of the story, often in a somewhat sketchy manner, but one longs repeatedly for more detail and for imposition of a firmer chronological sequence on the events described. The writing lacks a real sense and feel for Africa, its landscapes and its peoples, and indeed Thomas Packenham's treatment of the same topic in his "The Scramble for Africa", though more summary, is considerably more convincing and rewarding. An interesting footnote is that when Irish forces went to the Congo in 1960 as part of the UN response to the secession of Katanga, they did so as "The Casement Brigade" and the airbase near Dublin they flew out from has been known thereafter as the "Casement Airfield". One feels that the old champion of Congolese rights and of Irish independence would have approved fully.

Eye-opening account of a contemporary horror story.
The Belgian rape of the Congo is a subject barely touched on in the history books, and is more likely to be encountered as a stimulus to literary genius (witness Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"). This book is well-written and readable, and serves to whet the appetite for the subject. Although it is in many ways a compelling read, it leaves many questions unanswered and the reader will find him/herself wanting more information. As an iconoclastic work it reveals a darker side not only to a particularly "romantic" period of history, but to some feted individuals (for example, Stanley, of Dr. Livingstone fame). It should therefore be regarded as an accessible introduction to the topic which will stimulate the reader to seek further information. Comprehensive bibliography.

Leopold II: King Of The Congo, King Of Hell
This is a stunning account of Belgium's King Leopold II's rape and plunder of the Congo. His agents and officials dealt misery and death to millions of Congolese and subjugated the unfortunate natives with ferocious brutality. Meanwhile the King of the Congo (and Belgium) got fat off the staggering profits of ivory and rubber. This greedy consuming devil was master of planting friendly stories in the western press, cajoling, bribing, threatening and shouting to the world how much good he was doing in the Congo. Fortunately you can't fool all the people all the time. A group of very brave men (some who paid with their lives) soon expose the truth and hellish conditions of the the Congolese. Under severe pressure Leopold gifts (sells) the Congo to Belgium for a considerable sum. Half a century later after Belgium is forced to grant independence, the CIA assassinate the prime minister. A gruesome start for the young country.

The story is as upsetting as it is distasteful. Sad, sad, sad. The civilized shown up for their raw animism and the "uncivilized" pay the price for being behind the curve. I visited the Central Africa museum in Brussels shortly after finishing this book. It is truly frightening how the Belgians place virtually all blame on a few colluding chiefs and the competing Arab slave traders. It is said that history is written by the victors and state versions are the worst - nothing but brazen propaganda. With luck some day the Congolese will tell their own story. In the meantime, Hochschild does a wonderful job.